The colonial history is engrained in the DNA of Kolkata, a city famous for a memorial dedicated to a British queen. While the aforementioned building, the Victoria Memorial, is a distinguishing feature of the city, there are quite a few structures that now lie in different stages of decay.

The 19th century mansions built on Chitpur Road in north Kolkata are a case in point. In 2006, a German photographer named Peter Bialobrzeski came across these mansions while on a tour with conservation architect Manish Chakraborti.

"Manish pointed out that Chitpur was a unique architectural anomaly in our history. The houses in that locality were built by the Bengali elite but influenced by European architecture. Till then, the buildings had never been documented and not even a single book on Chitpur had been written, so Peter decided that it would be a good project to embark upon," says Tanvi Mishra, who has designed the exhibition 'Calcutta: Chitpur Road Neighbourhoods', an evolution of Bialobrzeski's project.

Bialobrzeski's project began with him going back to his homeland, bringing 21 of students from the University of Arts Bremen where he taught, and documented the mansions of Chitpur Road.

The students used a large format camera, working under the collective name of 'A Kolkata Heritage Photo Project', and made prints of the photographs in Germany. Other than an odd exhibition or two, nothing much really came of it in India.

A couple of years ago, Mishra, herself a documentary photographer, chanced upon a set of these prints at the Goethe-Institut. "The prints were catching mould, she says, adding, "We restored them and did an exhibition in Mumbai with both Peter and I being the curators of the show." After the Mumbai show, the prints were donated to the Alkazi Foundation, which helped Mishra develop the prints beyond its purpose.

Mullick Bari, PK Tagore Street. Picture courtesy: Mail Today

"I looked at the Alkazi Foundation's archive, trying to find elements in which would help me draw parallels with the 2006 prints. There are three periods of photographs from the archive-images from mid-1800s, images from 1948 taken by an American GI and the images from 2006-which draw parallels on how you look at architecture in the city. It shows how a city evolves over a period of time."